CBC Unscripted

From Bollywed to baking, CBC’s unscripted and documentary team wants to engage new audiences by shining a light on remarkable Canadians and their achievements.

Jennifer Dettman, executive director, unscripted content, CBC, tells Playback they’re focused on finding projects featuring connections to the country – whether it be through people or geography – and sparking a cultural conversation about what makes them unique.

Recent examples include competition reality format Canada’s Ultimate Challenge (Insight Productions, The Gurin Company), which sees athletes coaching players through challenges across the country, and unscripted series Push (Fenix Film & Television, Small Army Entertainment), about a group of friends and wheelchair users known as the “Wheelie Peeps.” Both premiered in February and have been renewed for second seasons, Dettman reveals.

Then there’s docuseries Bollywed (HeartHat Entertainment), about the Singh family and their bridal shop in Toronto’s Little India neighbourhood, which launched in January and was renewed in March. Also renewed is the Canada-Australia copro docuseries Stuff the British Stole, a co-commission by CBC and Australia’s ABC from Toronto’s Cream Productions and Australia’s Wooden Horse and WildBear Entertainment.

Playback: What is the current overall commissioning and content strategy for CBC unscripted?

Jennifer Dettman: There are specific buckets of work that we do. In the factual entertainment side of things, there’s the uniquely Canadian competition series. We’re finding real success in shows like The Great Canadian Baking Show (Boat Rocker’s Proper Television), Best in Miniature (marblemedia), Race Against the Tide (marblemedia), and we have another one that we’ll be announcing soon. We’re always looking for competition shows, but there’s a real gentleness to them. They’re about Canadians and their passions and the niche work they’re doing, but have broad appeal. Canada’s Ultimate Challenge is one of the most ambitious shows I think we’ve ever done. It made you fall in love with this country and its geography.

The other is point-of-view docuseries, where you’re landing in a community that often hasn’t had a light shone on it and applying the genre of docuseries to it. So we’ve got Bollywed and Push, and we certainly are looking for more of those types of productions. Both of those did really well – they had a distinct point of view, were highly engaging and entertaining with big characters that you wanted to spend time with, and you got to know a little bit more about the world that they live in.

Another big area of focus for us would be on the documentary side – premium features, premium documentary series. We’ve got a big documentary series coming up this fall on the Black experience in Canada, it’s an eight-part series [called Black Life: Untold Stories (Studio 112, Northwood Entertainment, Ugly Duck)]. Very high production value, great storytelling. So we’re looking for more of those types of both features and series – premium, high-end and documentary.

Are there any trends in unscripted you’re eyeing?

We look at different ways that we might take on a travel show that could work for us. Still Standing (Frantic Films) is a version of a travel show, so we ask ourselves, ‘Could we do something else to complement that, something more in that space?’ It’s personality-driven travel shows – someone leading the show who might be well-known, who takes us to places. But it’s what else they do, how they do it, is where the uniqueness would be for us.

We’re open to a lot of different things. We haven’t been as much in the space of things like studio-based music shows ... because it has been a very crowded space and we haven’t felt that audiences have responded very well to them.

Some of these series seem to have a high potential for binge-watching on CBC Gem. Is that important?

Yes, now when we commission, we commission for that audience, and we’re thinking about [the demographic] 30 to 49. One of the things which is exciting is we’re thinking more about how we window our content – how do we release it out into the world? How many episodes?

We don’t think about, ‘What are we going to do for CBC Gem, what are we going to do for CBC television?’ We just say, ‘How are we going to serve our audiences?’ And that audience is young and diverse.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Canadian Indie Producers

NAVIGATE RISING COSTS AND OTHER FINANCIAL PRESSURES.

BY KELLY TOWNSEND

Canada’s independent production sector is holding its own amid a sea of challenges.

The results of Playback’s 2023 Indie List survey reflect a duality of circumstances facing Canadian indie producers, who see opportunity in the ever-changing market, but are concerned over the amount of resources available to help take advantage of it.

Roughly 44% of survey respondents say opportunities for indie producers are the same in 2023 as they were in the previous year, while 39% say they’re worse than ever and less than 20% say they’re better than ever.

Among the concerns for the 67 indie prodcos that responded to the online survey – conducted between Feb. 2 and March 23, 2023 – were development funding, access to marketing support, budgeting for Canadian productions, and regional production incentives for smaller Canadian markets seeing a boom in service production, edging out space for indie productions.

Survey results also showed a sense of uncertainty around the future with the impact of the passage of Bill C-11 (see pg. 26), a series of amendments to the Broadcasting Act aimed to bring streaming giants such as Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ into Canada’s regulatory framework.

However, the results also reflect a significant volume of work accomplished by Canadian indies in 2022. More than $2.1 billion in domestic production and development spend was captured in the survey, as well as more than $1.4 billion in additional service work.

Rocking the boat

Leading the Indie List this year is Toronto-headquartered Boat Rocker Media, coming in at more than $295 million in spend across production and development during 2022.

David Fortier and Ivan Schneeberg, co-executive chairmen of Boat Rocker Media and co-chairmen of Boat Rocker Studios, tell Playback that taking the company public in 2021 allowed Boat Rocker to get out of debt and clean up their balance sheet after a string of acquisitions. The company’s subsidiaries include Insight Productions and Proper Television.

As a result, they could shift their focus to investing in content across scripted, unscripted, kids and family, and features. Fortier says being a “well-capitalized business” allows them to “be really active when it comes to development,” and “take more risks” when commissioning scripts and refining a piece of IP before taking it out to buyers.

“Optionality is the key, because projects tend to come together in a million different ways,” he says, whether through a financing partner, solo commissioning a script, or independently financing a production.

Staying afloat

That’s not to say the path has been easy. Indie producers are facing a myriad of challenges to complete financing on projects. Nearly 60% of participants say financing and budgets are the biggest challenge to their business in 2023, followed by staffing and hiring at 38% and inflation and global economic factors close behind with 36%.

“The biggest challenge is [finding] crews at every position, studio space, equipment, locations – it’s just so competitive,” says Schneeberg, adding that it’s not uncommon for competitors to pay thousands to hold studio space between projects, reducing access for other studios and indie producers. “It can be a real impediment to getting your show off the ground.”

Blink49 Studios COO Jeff Lynas says labour rates “have gone up significantly” due to the increase in production in Canada – Ontario, for instance, charted a record-breaking $3.15 billion in production spending in 2022 – as well as construction costs and gas rates. Those issues, paired with the already increased budget costs due to COVID-19 measures, have led to what Lynas estimates to be a roughly 10 to 15% increase in production budgets over the last two years, creating a gap in financing for premium content.

“Producers are having to step up to the plate and try to handle this gap that is not being [fully] financed

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